When text is entered in the “Comments for the Editor” textarea on the new submission form,it is attached to the submission as a 'Pre-Review Discussion".
At this point, the system doesn’t know who the Section Editor is going to be, so the “Comments for the Editor” discussion only has the Author assigned as a participant.
When a Section Editor is assigned to the submision, they are NOT being added as a participant to the “Comments for the Editor” discussion, so they cannot see it. After the submission has been assigned to the Section Editor, the “Comments for the Editor” is still only assigned to the Author alone.
My client has had some issues caused by this, because Authors are using this box to enter important info like suggested reveiwers or non-objective potential reveiwers, and this info has not been seen by the Section Editors.
As a temporary solution I have asked them to add the Section Editor to the discussion at the same time as assigning them to the submissions, but it would be better if this happened automatically - should it?
Have you tried assigning specific section editors to specific sections in the section settings? I’m wondering if that might make it so they are automatically assigned. Typically, if the section editor is not assigned by default (which is determined in the section settings), the do have to be manually assigned: https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/learning-ojs/en/editorial-workflow#assigning-the-submission
Thank you for your reply. All of the submissions for this journal are manually assigned to Editors. I did try a little test as you suggested, of assigning myself as the editor for a section and making a test submission. You are correct that in that scenario, the editor was automatically added as a participant to the ‘Comments for the Editor’ discussion so could see those notes.
However, when Editors are manually assigned to the submissions they are not being added as participants to that discussion. The Journal managers are aware of this now and will manually add them, but it will be easy to forget that extra step.
I’d say this was a bug, because those notes entered during the submission process definitely should be automatically made available to the editor assigned to the submissions when it is assigned. Can I report this as a bug here or should I do it over at Github?